Monday, April 03, 2006

We don't want no cultural representation

As I have been making regular visits to the UK since I stopped living there in '02, I thought I'd let Ruth Petrie, for many years now our esteemed and capable literature officer at Canada House in London, know that I had a new book in print, and see if I could perhaps arrange a reading for next year's visit. We launched my last collection, Old Habits, at Canada House in 1993.

So, on this the first day of Canada's new parliamentary session, I was sickened to receive an auto-reply from Ruth, advising correspondents that "We in the Cultural section have, as of 3 April, been given redundancy notice. "

So much for the High Commission's mandate to represent us in "Canada's most important cultural export market in Europe and second only to the United States in the world.."